Bing admit they will probably never take Google’s Search Market Share

At the Web Summit conference in Ireland, Stefan Weitz (Microsoft’s Director of Search) admitted Bing is unlikely to have a significant effect on Google’s search market share.

They have estimated that they (both Bing and Yahoo) have 30% of the share of pure keyword search in the US, and less in Europe. Although Bing’s share has increased slowly over the years, it is increasing at the expense of Yahoo – not Google.

So what are they going to do about it?

Since it is quite clear that Bing will never replace Google for pure keyword search, and Bing are obviously aware of this, we might wonder what Bing plan on doing to gain the share of the market elsewhere.

Stefan Weitz said at the Web Summit conference that Bing will aim to make its search technology more prominent in other things that people use daily, such as mobile apps.
Additionally, Bing have also focussed on conversational search that it launched in August. As explained by Search Engine Land, conversational search is a new feature that allows the site to ‘remember’ the context of a search between queries.

To explain this, they use the example of presidential searches. If you searched, for example, for who the president of the US is and then searched for who he is married to (without using his name – only using the pronoun ‘he’), the results should reflect the first search. In other words, the search results ‘remember’ the first query and thus ‘remember’ that ‘he’ refers to the president.

Alongside this, Bing have announced that they will be releasing more search features in the future in order to gain some more of the search market.
So, it is clear (to everyone, it seems) that Bing will probably never take Google’s search market share – but they can at least attempt to make a small dent in it with these new search features.